


'tween the devil and the deep blue sea

by Sanamun



Category: Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins
Genre: Alternate Universe - Supernatural Elements, Flash Fiction, Gen, Sea Monsters, cosmic horror
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-14
Updated: 2019-10-14
Packaged: 2020-12-16 08:40:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 446
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21033413
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sanamun/pseuds/Sanamun
Summary: Annie is mad, they say, when she talks in her soft singsong voice of ghosts and monsters, and of other, stranger things; things without name. When she tells them of Mother Ocean and her hunger and her children; of the dark, grasping things beneath the waves, all desperation and eyes and teeth.





	'tween the devil and the deep blue sea

Annie is mad, they say, when she talks in her soft singsong voice of ghosts and monsters, and of other, stranger things; things without name. When she tells them of Mother Ocean and her hunger and her children; of the dark, grasping things beneath the waves, all desperation and eyes and teeth. 

Annie is mad, indeed, but its not her fault. Wouldn’t you be? Her green eyes dart around, fixating on the things that others can’t see, but that doesn’t make them not-there. She drops her sentences mid-way through like children dropping stones, because there are things Annie cannot say. They aren’t for our ears. It is Annie who was chosen to tell their tale, and her punishment is to never be believed. 

When she was younger, smaller and softer and not yet a killer, Annie liked to sit on the beach. A lonely and angry child, daughter of a damaged woman, telling her worries to the void of the sea. Still an innocent, when it talks back she does not yet know to be afraid. 

As Annie grows, as she learns to swim and fight and look pretty for the cameras, so to do the whisperings in her mind’s-eye, voices that drive her to places where the currents meet the land, to swim in waters so polluted that her brown skin comes out scrubbed raw, no matter how her Mama deems it a distraction. There are secrets here, Annie knows, if she can just dive down that bit further, just press on past the point where the pressure hurts her head, past where her lungs scream at her to stop and find the truth.

(The ability to force her body and the water to act as one will come in handy someday, though Annie does not know it.)

Annie doesn’t know what it is she finds, there in the dark and the cold and the blue, what she sees with her mind because surely her eyes can’t be working down here, in the dead of night, looking at herself from the outside in. She can’t comprehend it in the time she has, couldn’t with all the time in the world, just gets a sense of tentacles and eyes and smiles with too many teeth; a shrieking cacophony of a thousand voices making sounds she is sure can’t be real. Then the world fades away to the inky darkness Annie remembers from before she was born.

Annie washes up on the shore in victors’ village, vomiting black bile and tiny, perfect shells. She is the most promising student in her class, but Annie knows now she is but an arrogant child, understanding nothing of the world.

**Author's Note:**

> There may or may not be more of this! Its an interesting concept but I've honestly never written cosmic horror before and don't really know what to do with it lol.


End file.
